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From: "Stewart, Peter" <>
Subject: RE: Primary and secondary sources
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:21:11 +1000


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathaniel Taylor [mailto:]
> Sent: Wednesday, 23 August 2000 5:16
> To:
> Subject: Re: Primary and secondary sources
>
>
> Bernard Schulmann wrote:
>
> > > To give an example, I have seen some genealogists refer
> to published
> > > parish register transcripts (even very high quality ones)
> as secondary
> > > sources. On the other hand, if a historian cites a
> highly regarded
> > > critical edition of a contemporary medieval chronicle
> whose manuscript
> > > is unavailable for examination (which I think is an analogous
> > > situation), I do not believe that that historian's
> colleagues would
> > > accuse the historian of using secondary sources, simply
> because the
> > > original manuscript was not consulted.
> >
> > Actually it would be considered a secondary source. . .
>
> Stewart was referring to the usage current among historians,
> not genealogists, and he is
> correct: the published transcription of some document would
> generally be referred to in
> historical writing and teaching as a 'primary source'.
>

It may be worthwhile to consider what is meant by "source" rather than just
disagreeing about "primary" vs "secondary".

In nature it is the spring or fountain-head from which a stream issues. For
most purposes, genealogists will need to draw from their chosen stream along
a fair stretch of its length, since the persons at the fountain-head may not
have been documented at all while they were alive and it was theoretically
spouting. Is an inq pm record "secondary" because the subject was absent, or
where this may be the only source to indentify parents or grandparents even
longer dead, when this may be the only spring of information on these
people?

I think a source remains "primary" as a natural one remains pure, until
there is any tributary input - this may be interpretation, analysis,
translation, transcription or whatever. But a "secondary" source may still
be preferable, as Mr Baldwin says, because of the greater expertise that
flowed in from another fountain-head of knowledge, in the form of critical
apparatus etc.

Or for quite extraneous reasons: years ago I studied the notes passed
between Charles II and Clarendon in council meetings. The originals, my
"primary" source, contain eloquent flourishes, spacing and so on that give
clues as to attitudes and mood or emphasise jokes, etc, which would
inevitably be lost in transcription. However, I studied them in a somewhat
distracting atmosphere, during bitterly cold and too-short winter evenings
in Duke Humphrey's room at the Bodleian. Should I therefore have considered
my own notated transcriptions, studied at leisure in more amenable
circumstances, to be a tainted "secondary" source for this material? I
didn't, but anyone else using them should do so (as well as "infinitarily"
illegible for that matter).

Peter Stewart

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